While TV ratings were down for this year’s Grammy Awards, tweets went up. Social media intelligence agency the Whispr Group tracked who dominated the social media spotlight during the 55th Grammys. Based on data points surrounding hashtags, nominees, performances, style, and fans, and followers, a few things were made abundantly clear: Alice in Wonderland is not a good look for everyone, Justin Timberlake is and will forever remain a heart throb, and fervent self-promotion works.

Check out the full infographic below:

Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos was named Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year today for his part in changing both the bookstore and the book itself.

Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and has since redefined what a bookstore is. Most recently he introduced a 7-inch Kindle Fire HD tablet that competes directly with Apple’s iPad Mini and is seemingly very bullish on the e-reader market. As opposed to his competitors, Bezos often pushes the idea that Amazon won’t make money off of its hardware, but rather, Amazon will make money off of the content that brings those tablets alive.

Fortune chooses the businessperson of the year by looking at the financial standing of the candidate’s company, stock performance, and market value. It also looks at the person’s leadership, how they “gracefully steer a very large organization,” if they’re risky, if they’re strategic. Lastly, it looks at whether the company itself has “cultural significance,” perhaps has maybe changed the way we do something. In Amazon’s case, this is the overhaul of the book market.

Specifically, Fortune factored in Bezos’ management style, which includes asking his employees to submit new ideas through a six-page written narrative. He told Fortune in order to write a memo like this, you have to have a clear head, an understanding of what you’re writing. Bezos also stresses the focus on the consumer. He says his competition spends time in the shower thinking about overcoming their biggest adversaries, while his employees spend that time thinking about better products for their customers.

Runners-up include Apple CEO Tim Cook, eBay CEO John Donahoe, and Samsung CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon.

Other tech favorites on the broader list of 50 best businesspeople of the year include Google’s Larry Page, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, IBM’s Ginni Rometty, and Square’s Jack Dorsey. Fortune says Dorsey made it to the list because of metrics looking at leadership and cultural disruption.

Jeff Bezos image via jurvetson/Flickr

It’s not nearly often enough that we hear about startup ideas that address global hunger, fuel inefficiency, or support the deaf and blind.

This week, Intel threw an event to do just that — to uncover these ideas from research labs, and provide them with funds for launch in the global market. This is the eighth time that the computing device maker has hosted the global business plan competition. This year, it was held at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, and the finalists received $100,000.

The winner?

Greenway Grameen Infra (GGI), a team from India that produces efficient, biomass-based cooking solutions to replace indoor open fires and traditional mud stoves.

The flagship product is the Greenway Smart Stove, which incorporates a unique air-flow generator to provide clean and efficient combustion, saving up to 65 percent of fuel and resulting in a 70 percent reduction in smoke. The team piloted the stove in India; sales topped 12,000 units through rural retail outlets. The team received $50,000 from Intel’s Foundation.

“The Intel Global Challenge inspires and rewards great entrepreneurs who bring the best science and technology innovations from universities around the world to market for the benefit of us all,” said Andre Marquis, executive director, Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UC Berkeley. Marquis said it has bolstered the school’s efforts to build a network of entrepreneurs around the world.

The runners up include Dreambender, an Indonesia-based startup that has developed an innovative sign language system; it uses Microsoft’s Kinect as a motion sensor, enabling users to practice gestures based on video examples until they have mastered them. ISkyTracker, a Russian technology, enables people to connect to the Internet anywhere. Its system provides automatic searches for telecommunication satellites.

Read more about the recent Tech Laureate awards (another recent competition to reward “tech for good” ideas) here.

Top image courtesy of Alexander Kirch, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Location analytics company Placed beat out four other mobile services companies today at our MobileBeat Innovation Competition.

For winning the competition, Placed bagged our Tesla Prize, which is named after Nikola Tesla, the scientist who developed early mobile communication. The company will receive a two-hour business strategy session from three principals at Tandem Capital, as well as 10,000 Business ExtrAA points from American Airlines (or around five domestic round-trip tickets).

We want to thank the industry leaders that are supporting MobileBeat 2012: W3i as Platinum Sponsor; Box as Corporate Sponsor; Flurry, Tapjoy & YouWeb as Gold Sponsors; Greystripe, Nokia Developer, LifeStreet Media, Ludei & Sequoia Capital as Silver Sponsors; Game Insight, Apsalar, Kontagent, GREE, Nexage, Pontiflex, Swrve, Urban Airship, PayPal, Betable, Xyologic, and Tandem as Event Sponsors; and MyPref & PubNub as Contributing Sponsors.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Love it or hate it, Apple is about design.

The company’s annual design awards were announced this week at the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Calif., showcasing the best the iOS and Mac development communities have produced.

Since it’s better to gaze upon amazing design than to read words about it, here’s a visual treat: a tour through the best design on iPhone, iPad, and Mac for the past year. Scan through and pick up some inspiration!

Here are the winners in each section. Skip down for slideshows and links for each:

• iPhone
  • JetPack Joyride
  • National Parks
  • Where’s My Water?
• iPad
  • Bobo Explores Light
  • DM1 the Drum Machine
  • Paper FiftyThree
• Mac
  • Deus Ex
  • Limbo
  • Sketch
• Student
  • DaWindci
  • Little Star

iPhone

The best iPhone apps are sleek, sexy, and perfect for the task at hand, whether it’s gaming, organization, or education.

Here’s are winners as selected by Apple:

JetPack Joyride by Halfbrick Studios
A video game this successful with only one control? Wow.

Where’s My Water? by Disney
You know you gotta help Swampy find his water!

National Parks by National Geographic
Explore 20 of the United States’ most beautiful national parks on your Phone.

iPad

iPad gives designers a little more room, but the best user interface engineers know to not take that space for granted. Instead, they create user experiences that feel roomy and spacious, with everything just in the right spot, and nothing too closely crowded.

Here are some of the best of 2012 on iPad.

Bobo Explores Light by Game Collage, LLC
Who wouldn’t want a science museum focused on light for kids age 4-12, even if you’re an adult?

DM1 The Drum Machine by Fingerlab
You know it has to be well-designed to beat out Apple’s own GarageBand in this category.

Paper by FiftyThree by FiftyThree, Inc.
Capture all your ideas on paper the old-school way, except a little updated for iPad.

Mac

iPhone and iPad are getting all the glory, but the Mac is still chugging along with new Retina displays, faster processors, and new solid-state drives in Macbook Pros. The group is still growing faster than Windows-based PCs.

Here’s some of the best design on the Mac, where it all started.

Deus Ex Human Revolution Ultimate Edition by Feral Interactive, Inc.
Get augmented in a dystopic, futuristic cyberpunk computer game.

Limbo by Playdead
Dark and atmospheric, this is a creepy but beautiful universe to enter.

Sketch by Bohemian Coding
A professional drawing app, on your Mac, for user interface, icon, and web design.

Student

The best apps that the student community has created.

DaWindci by Reality Twist GmbH
Pilot your hot air balloon on the shifting winds of 45 different expeditions.

Little Star by BiBoBox Studio
A fully interactive book with bonus games

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Image credit: ShutterStock

So I went to the Webbys last night and was compelled to write a scathing critique calling for its death. It was bloody and brutal — and then two hours in, WordPress ate my post (yes, I saved, shut up).

So here’s a condensed version: Host Patton Oswalt was great, as always, but the Webbys were as irrelevant as ever. It felt like a fever dream where people actually used Google+ (a major sponsor), and not at all an accurate representation of digital culture.

But, hey, at least they had a decent Steve Jobs memorial, led by Richard Dreyfuss (who had a few choice words for Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin regarding user privacy), with video appearances by Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore.

It was fun to watch Oswalt juggle the insanity of the ceremony. “Interactive advertising, really?! This is like Sad Men,” he quipped when introducing the ad-related awards.

The big problem with the Webbys is that you have to pay to be considered for an award — effectively making the nominees advertisers. It doesn’t matter how good your website or app is, if you don’t pay the entry fees (which ranges between $150 and $495) you’re not even a contender.

It seems completely antithetical to the open nature of the web, and it’s also backwards compared to the way other industry awards are considered. (If you want the full story, Wired’s Andy Baio has a great takedown of the Webby’s model.)

Popular video-sharing site Vimeo is entering a new era. Already this year, a new CEO has taken the reins, the company has drastically redesigned its main site, and it has launched a wide array of mobile apps to bring more mobile users into the fold.

It’s only appropriate then that the site’s upcoming Vimeo Festival + Awards event, taking place June 7-9 in New York, has been given the theme “The End of the Beginning.” This distinctive event will help Vimeo celebrate its roots and embrace the digital future at the same time. It’s also about defining Vimeo as the home for original web video content and as one of the biggest supporters of grassroots filmmaking on the web.

“We want to celebrate original video in a way that no one else is,” Vimeo Festival Director Jeremy Boxer told VentureBeat. “There has been an evolution in the art of filmmaking and the barriers to entry are lower than ever to make an incredible film.”

This is the second Vimeo Festival + Awards, but the stakes are higher this time around. On one hand, the festival shows how much the company cares about maintaining its image as a YouTube-like entity that cares about and connects with its users. It has relayed this image since it launched as a side project in 2006, and if the company can continue to own this niche, it will keep hold of its identity as the “coolest” video site.

But the event is also embracing the future of media, which is quickly moving online, with professional and original content streaming side by side. The barriers to entry are incredibly low now, so anyone with strong willpower can make their movie and get instant distribution via the web.

“With fundraising through sites like Kickstarter and distribution through sites like Vimeo, it’s never been easier to put out a movie that doesn’t compromise your artistic style,” Boxer said.

Boxer agreed with me that writer and director Lena Dunham of the indie movie Tiny Furniture and the new HBO TV series Girls is a great example of a young filmmaker who shot to stardom without many resources. Technology has made it possible to shoot an entire feature on a DSLR or a smartphone, and you can upload your work straight to the web for the world to see. Boxer said the Festival has embraced these attitudes.

Boxer noted that video submissions for the first Festival + Awards totaled 6,500 videos. This time, the event attracted 14,500 submissions, with the overall quality jumping as well. That not only indicates stronger interest about the event, but it also shows how general interest in Vimeo has grown.

Also bigger than last time is the roster of judges. Big names include comedian Aziz Ansari, actor James Franco, Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright, Radiohead member Colin Greenwood, and many others. Some winners from the first Festival will also judge this year.

Check out a few of the selections for the Vimeo Festival + Awards below (and vote here for your favorites):

Fleet Foxes – The Shrine / An Argument (Music Video)

For Skateboarding and the City (Action Sports)

The Hive (Narrative)

Robots of Brixton (Animation)